Swiss

The Swiss group includes the German-speaking High Alemannic, French-speaking Arpitan, the Romansh of the eastern valleys and the Franc-Comtois of the Jura borderland. Their languages differ, but a shared political history united them.

The Old Swiss Confederacy formed at the end of the thirteenth century from a core in central Switzerland and had added Zurich and Bern by the mid-fourteenth century, joining rural and urban communes of the Holy Roman Empire. Victories in the Burgundy Wars of the 1470s made it a military power, and after the Swabian War of 1499 it was independent in practice. It had thirteen cantons by 1513, and the Reformation then divided them by faith.